'Criminal bribery': Sarah Palin's connection to a controversial developer draws new scrutiny

18 July 2022

In Alaska, former Gov. Sarah Palin is running for office for the first time since she was the late Sen. John McCain’s running mate in the United States’ 2008 presidential election. Palin, running for the U.S. House of Representatives seat once held by the late Rep. Don Young and endorsed by former President Donald Trump, once again finds herself receiving a great deal of media scrutiny — including a report from the Daily Beast’s William Bredderman focusing on Palin’s ties to a controversial developer in Arizona.

“One of ex-Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s biggest business partners is an Arizona developer a House committee accused earlier this year of using political ties to access — and ultimately bribe — the Trump Administration into letting a massive Grand Canyon state project proceed,” Bredderman explains in an article published by the Beast on July 18. “Palin revealed her dealings with Scottsdale-based El Dorado Holdings in disclosures she made to the House clerk’s office as part of her bid for Alaska’s vacant congressional district. The filings show that the one-time Republican vice-presidential hopeful holds stakes worth as much as half a million dollars in a pair of limited liability companies El Dorado controls.”

Bredderman notes that El Dorado Holdings “became the epicenter of national controversy when a U.S. Fish and Wildlife field supervisor claimed, in 2019, that he’d come under politically motivated pressure from then-President Donald Trump’s Department of the Interior to reverse his position on permitting requirements for a 28,000-unit planned development in Benson, Arizona.”

“In May of this year, the House Committee on Natural Resources sent a criminal referral to the Department of Justice, urging it to investigate what Chairman Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) described as a case of ‘criminal bribery,’” Bredderman reports. “The Committee’s investigation uncovered covert correspondence carried out over non-government channels between El Dorado executives and top staffers at the Department of the Interior in 2017. These communications culminated in an undisclosed meeting in Billings, Montana, between El Dorado founder Mike Ingram and then-Interior Deputy Secretary David Bernhardt, who would later assume the agency’s top job.”

According to Bredderman, Palin’s congressional campaign “did not respond to repeated requests for comment.” That isn’t surprising. The 58-year-old Palin, a very polarizing figure known for her emphasis on far-right culture war politics, tends to favor media outlets that are the least likely to ask her tough questions, such as Fox News and Newsmax TV.

Bredderman reports that an anonymous source “close to” the House Natural Resources Committee “believed a third party acted as an interlocutor between Ingram, who formerly co-owned the Arizona Diamondbacks, and the presidential appointees.”

That source told the Beast, “That was something we wondered, how he got hooked up with the Trump Administration, how he made those connections. It seems clear it was somebody very high up who helped facilitate those introductions and meetings.”

According to Bredderman, the anonymous source “did not know whether that person was Palin.”

“Curiously, late Alaska Rep. Don Young — whose passing in March created the potential opening for Palin — also held a stake in one of the same El Dorado entities as his would-be replacement,” Bredderman reports. “Young’s widow, who for some years has maintained a residence in Arizona, did not respond to requests for comment. Young himself served on the Natural Resources Committee for decades, and became its chairman emeritus in 2017. The Daily Beast could not find any record of another member of Congress holding investments in an El Dorado entity. Neither of the limited liability companies in which Young or Palin invested appear to have been directly involved in the federal permitting process for the project in question.”

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